#9 Ethics and the Evolution of NLP
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Lucerne
25 April 2025
Facial expressions as perceived by a model by (Peterson et al. 2022)
The narrative of autonomous and evil-minded robots is an illusion.
King = 1, Queen = 2, Man = 3, Woman = 4Vector-representations of words as discrete symbols (Colyer 2016)
NLP is great. I love NLP.
I understand NLP.
NLP, NLP, NLP.
NLP |
I |
is |
term | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Doc 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | … |
| Doc 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | … |
| Doc 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | … |
| Doc ID | … | … | … | term frequency |
___ tonight”.___.”You shall know a word by the company it keeps!
Firth (1957)
King – Man + Woman = QueenFrance / Paris = Switzerland / Bernbank)Autocompletion on iPhone
«___ becomes a doctor.»
Gender bias of the commonly used language model BERT (Devlin et al. 2019)
Gender bias of the commonly used language model BERT (Devlin et al. 2019)
Simplified illustration of a neural network. Arrows are weights and bullets are (intermediate) states.
🤓 train with gradient descent, a series of small steps taken to minimize an error function
“This sentence contains 37 characters.”
“Dieser Satz enthält 32 Buchstaben.”
Gender bias in Google Translate
Raw data is an oxymoron.
Gitelman (2013)
Don’t ask if artificial intelligence is good or fair, ask how it shifts power.
Kalluri (2020)
Text generation may be used to communicate difficult decisions strategically
Don’t be a fool. Be wise, think twice.
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